Since when is war against an enemy whose stated purpose is your destruction a "tit-for-tat" affair, one death at a time?
Proportionality is a principle. Not just in international law when waging a war but also pragmatically. You don't send a four-man squad against an army nor do you mobilise your entire population when your plan is not to wipe out your neighbour.
Impartial onlookers can take note that Israel has mobilised absolutely all resources and is observing no proportionality whatsoever against far weaker enemy. Not to mention mass displacement of practically the entire civilian population in Gaza.
You again demonstrated that you know literally nothing about anything. This will keep happening until you acknowledge this to yourself and get a grip.
You'll likewise not care when Taiwan is "reunified"... (I don't recall you being upset at what happened when Great Britain ceded Hong Kong back to China...)
One wonders: How about Estonia?
Do Taiwan and Estonia compare here the way USA did for you earlier in the thread?
You have (and you think USA has or must preferably have) both the persecution complex and saviour complex at the same. On this point, there is no analogy with Israel. First off, nobody ever persecuted USA. Nobody ever invaded USA. After War of Independence (or perhaps 1812 war), not a single battle has ever been fought on U.S. soil. And USA never saved anyone, only displaced, annexed and colonised. Jews, on the other hand, have in fact been persecuted, and the country of Israel has been created on the sentiment of taking back the ancient homeland for the sake of self-determination, and in the process root out and subdue the pre-existing Arab population. Not to save them, but root out most and subdue the rest. Israel displays no signs of saviour complex.
So it is flawed in every way to try to conjure up any analogy between USA and Israel. As I said above: Confederate sympathisers are deeply racist slavery-nostalgic jerks. Zionists are carving out a country for themselves by means of ethnic cleansing. Zebulon Vance was wrong seeing parallels here and so are you. It is even more wrong to try to see any parallels with Estonia or Taiwan here, particularly when you know hardly anything even about your own country where you lived all your life.
But -of course- because Gorsuch has been described as "Conservative" and something he said may support an ultra-liberal (for ersi, any anti Trump) stance, I must be a hypocrite!
You're a hypocrite either way, with or without Gorsuch. But thanks for clarifying some of Gorsuch's shenanigans. (I really could not care less.) It remains to be figured out if you are against him because he is not hypocritical enough for you or because you're aspiring to out-hypocrite him but your efforts go unrecognised.
Namely: Yet again you have nothing to say about the substantive matter, the leading Republican presidential candidate Trump who is at the same time election head-fraudster and insurrection arch-conspirator. You always miss the point in every topic every single time.
Summary: Q: I just heard one might call you naive. Is this true?
A: Yes, honestly. Despite having worked for security organs for decades, I assumed that the so-called civilised world understood that there is no longer any ideological pushback from Russia, thus no reason for confrontation, and if anything negative happened, such as Western support of terrorists in Russia, I assumed it was only inertia of thought and action of former middle class in Western establishment, who were used to struggle against Soviet Union. This was naive on my part. Reality is that, like Brzezinski suggested, the West wants to divide Russia in five parts and subjugate the parts to themselves.
Q: While USA leads imperial policies, they also say that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he would attack Nato.
A: I'm sure Biden understands this is completely false, but he maintains it as a figure of speech to hide their erroneous policy with regard to Russia. First, it is erroneous because it does not harmonise with their interests in terms of what they envisioned for mutual relations with Russia decades ago. Second, USA as the master of Nato − Nato is their backyard − should see that Russia has no geopolitical, economic or military interest to wage war with Nato countries. They took Finland and made it a Nato country. We had long ago resolved all disputes with Finland, the relations were most warm and heartfelt, but now we will have problems because of confrontation with Leningrad military district. Why are they doing this? This way they are creating artificial problems because they want to outcompete Russia.
Q: How will you spend the New Year's Eve? You said earlier you'd be watching the president's speech. Anything else?
A: Champagne with people close to me and discussions on mundane topics.
Edit: Nice cozy interview I must say. From this one should get a sense of the kind of dude that Putin is. Namely, in my opinion geopolitics is importantly a character study. And then compare it with the kind of character that e.g. Mearsheimer sees in Putin.
I generously assumed that Israel would begin to relent once Palestinian casualties amount to tenfold Israeli casualties. Now the balance of casualties approaches 100-fold in Israel's favour. I have severely misunderestimated Israel's ruthlessness. Israeli soldiers even shoot their own returning hostages.
Colorado Supreme Court turned out braver than the lonely judge: Yes, Trump is an insurrectionist and therefore removed from ballot.
Technically it will suffice to repeat this in a few more states, but it would be more correct to decide it in SCOTUS. And incorrect of SCOTUS to leave the decision to the last minute.
Colorado court used Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's ruling to justify disqualifying Trump
- Trump is disqualified from the ballot in Colorado, the state's Supreme Court ruled. - But the case is sure to go to the Supreme Court. - Colorado's court cited Justice Neil Gorsuch in their decision.
The Colorado Supreme Court cited Gorsuch's ruling as cover for its unprecedented decision to kick Trump off a primary ballot based on the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.
"As then-Judge Gorsuch recognized in Hassan, it is 'a state's legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process' that 'permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office,'" the state opinion reads.
"We zien dat Rusland is overgeschakeld op een oorlogsindustrie", zegt Hofman. "Ik denk dat we ons terecht zorgen moeten maken. De taal van het Kremlin en van president Vladimir Poetin is altijd dubbelzinnig. Het is absoluut niet uitgesloten dat ze later ook andere ideeën krijgen. Ofwel in het zuiden in Moldavië of de Baltische Staten."
How is such a prognostication possible? Because there is no plan to ensure that Russia will be pushed back in Ukraine. The West has decided that Russia shall not lose.
Also, everybody's favourite "realist"[1] John Mearsheimer recently argued thusly: Ukraine must become "neutral" (i.e. disarmed and unconcerned with its own foreign affairs) and give up the four annexed oblasts, or else Russia will want to annex four more oblasts. So, in order to stop the annexation of four more oblasts, Ukraine must yield and sign peace with Russia on Russia's terms. He makes this point beginning at 1:08:35 in this interview:
In other words, the school of geopolitical so-called realism teaches: There are big dogs and small dogs, and small dogs shall have no sovereignty. And Ukraine is small!
The "kid gloves" is because Austria hasn't done domestically what Fidesz has done.
The kid gloves are also because this is more about banks and less about the government. In an approved country banks are far more powerful than the government. In an approved country, whatever banks do is deemed acceptable.
The 12th round of Russia sanctions was to impose an EU ban on imports of Russian diamonds, tighten EU exports of high-tech goods, and blacklist mercenary firms, according to a draft.
Raiffeisen Bank has 9,000 employees in Russia, where it does consumer banking, and where it made €2bn profit last year.
It is "beneficial [chiefly] to the Russian elites, as it allows them to continue transferring funds abroad", after earlier EU sanctions disconnected most Russian banks from the Swift international-transfers grid, Russian financial consultant Ivan Fedyakov previously told this website.
"Austria has been quietly playing on Russia's team for a long time — they're a huge problem in the EU. Potentially explosive. To be watched closely," a senior EU diplomat said.
"It's not Austria learning from Hungary, but the other way around," the diplomat said.
"I never understood why everyone forgives them [the Austrians] so easily, treats them with kid gloves compared to Orbán, or other EU rogues", he added.
In addition to Raiffeisen I can mention also UniCredit and HypoVerein as such banks.
The "methods and policies deployed" turned out to be between futile and ruinous... You missed that? Oh, I forgot: You follow the party line!
To say that the measures were futile and ruinous is the party line. Every country took the same measures. Every country without exception. Even Trump-led USA did it. You missed that?
Well, of course you missed that. You do not do facts at all. You strictly toe the QAnon MAGA party line.
Why did every country take the measures? Because a global pandemic is ruinous. It was the politicians' job to respond to it, but as people in general, they did not do their job very well. For example, in Sweden the main expert who jumped to the forefront (and was given the lead) suggested minimal measures expecting herd immunity to kick in quick this way, he was wrong. He missed that these pandemics had been recurring in Far East for decades and no herd immunity had kicked in.
...only if we take the right lessons from what was an abysmal response in most of the Western World: Determine the threat, mitigate by protecting the most vulnerable, and let actual science proceed — to give us the best understanding possible...
I fear the worst lessons were learned: Ignore or obfuscate the the origin of the threat, impose next to useless societal and economically ruinous strictures, and stifle scientific communication so that only that which supports the strictures is communicated...
Even in the worst case scenario, though: Humanity will likely survive. Natural selection hasn't been obviated — only outlawed!
Who doesn't/didn't know where the epidemic started? Far East has faced a series of similar epidemics.
The methods and policies deployed in the West are the same as were already in use in Far East, that is less touching, more cleaning of hands, masks and vaccines. All these methods have a proven effect with very contagious air-borne viruses, but are far from fully reliable - because it's a very contagious air-borne virus and people don't follow best practices for various reasons.
Are the methods Communist? Are countries like Japan and Singapore Communist because they deployed the same methods as Vietnam and China?
To whine against a global policy that was necessary against a global epidemic is ultimate snowflakery. If natural selection operated uninhibited, you'd have been selected for extinction by now. However, liberal humanist principles tend to safeguard the lesser ones among us. So don't worry, you are well protected.
The right lessons had already been learned and the corresponding rules were more or less ready to be deployed. The worst lesson would have been to do as you advise: Act like a headless chicken as if something unprecedented and unforeseen was going on.
There's some urge to celebrate 25 years of ISS just before it will be relegated into space junk. In some people's minds, the space station has served as an indication that cooperation with Russia is possible. I'd say it is more of an indication that Russians can restrain themselves in landmark situations of cosmic proportions. However, they still interpret those situations their own way, different from what anyone else might think.
Not too long ago Russians also managed to put out a real space movie, the world's first feature film shot in space, to go along with their other space successes, such as first satellite in space and first man in space. I have not seen it.
Instead I have seen the very anti-space space movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock. The main message: Space is deadly dangerous. You're lucky if you get back alive. Excellent 3D effects though, worth seeing in 3D.
Although Estonia's 15-year-olds were only outperformed by their contemporaries from two other OECD countries – Japan and South Korea – in the latest PISA test (that excludes Singapore, an OECD partner country), the math and functional reading skills of Estonia's youth have fallen over the last four years. Teachers say this is mainly down to distance learning due to the pandemic, while the lack of sufficiently qualified teachers may also play a role.
Earth will become unlivable for most organisms in about 1.3 billion years due to the sun's natural evolution, experts told Live Science. And humans could potentially drive ourselves (and countless other species) to extinction within the next few centuries, if the current pace of human-made climate change isn't mitigated, or as a consequence of nuclear war.
Researchers found wild fluctuations—called drift—in the technology’s ability to perform certain tasks. The study looked at two versions of OpenAI’s technology over the time period: a version called GPT-3.5 and another known as GPT-4. The most notable results came from research into GPT-4’s ability to solve math problems. Over the course of the study researchers found that in March GPT-4 was able to correctly identify that the number 17077 is a prime number 97.6% of the times it was asked. But just three months later, its accuracy plummeted to a lowly 2.4%. Meanwhile, the GPT-3.5 model had virtually the opposite trajectory. The March version got the answer to the same question right just 7.4% of the time—while the June version was consistently right, answering correctly 86.8% of the time.
SNP MSP Natalie Don had introduced a private member’s bill to the Holyrood in 2022 in which she said the failure to pardon the women “prolongs misogyny”.
The proposed Witchcraft Convictions (Pardons) (Scotland) Bill would have pardoned those convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1563.
One X user said: “Where’s the compassion for all those that were turned into newts by witches.”
Another said: “If this is your priority then your constituents are being robbed of their taxes.”
A Scottish government spokesman said: “Natalie Don’s member’s bill was withdrawn when she was appointed as a minister as it is a parliamentary rule that Scottish ministers do not promote member’s bills. Ministers have no plans to legislate in this area.”
“Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant,” said the lead author, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry department of civil, environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University. “This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”
Henneman led a group of researchers who used publicly available data to track air pollution – and its health effects – from the 480 US coal power plants that operated at some point between 1999 and 2020. A model was used to track the wind direction and reach of the toxins from each power station. Annual exposure levels were then connected with more than 650m Medicare health records that covered most people over age 65 in the US.
The coal plants associated with most deaths were located east of the Mississippi River in industrialized states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where power stations were historically constructed close to population hubs. But every region had at least one plant linked to 600 deaths, while 10 were associated with more than 5,000 deaths across the study period.
About 85% of the total 460,000 coal plant-related deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, an average of more than 43,000 deaths per year. The death toll declined drastically as plants closed or scrubbers – a type of sulphur filter – were installed to comply with new environmental rules. By 2020, the coal PM2.5 death toll had dropped 95%, to 1,600 people.
Edit: To compare with traffic deaths from here, I calculated that there were 841,041 fatal casualties in traffic in USA over the same period, from 1999 to 2020. So on a positive note, coal deaths are not as bad as traffic deaths. However, traffic deaths are rather stable and steady, not on decline.
(It mentions senator, representative, elector and vice president, but not president. However, it also mentions anyone who has previously taken an oath, so there's no reason why this should not apply to the president.)
But it seems that people who think that the president is included there in Section 3 of 14th Amendment don't take on the case. The judges who take on the case are in line with the self-preservation instinct of the establishment. The principle is that laws don't apply to the establishment.
With his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, an offense that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 to keep former Confederates out of the government — deems disqualifying for people who previously took an oath to support the Constitution.
But Judge Wallace, a state district court judge in Denver, concluded that Section 3 did not include the presidential oath in that category.
The clause does not explicitly name the presidency, so that question hinged on whether the president was included in the category “officer of the United States.”
Because of “the absence of the president from the list of positions to which the amendment applies combined with the fact that Section 3 specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Judge Wallace wrote, “it appears to the court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath.”
[...]
Judge Wallace is the first judge to rule on the merits of whether Section 3 applies to Mr. Trump. Similar lawsuits in Minnesota and New Hampshire have been dismissed on procedural grounds, and a judge in Michigan recently ruled that the questions were political ones that courts did not have the authority to decide.
Shockwaves of international diplomatic scandal ravage over Europe as Moldova's First Dog, Maia Sandu's Codruț, bites the hand of Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen.
Your post pretended to be an answer to my points. It wasn't, so I take the liberty to return the same service.
Your main thrust is that the West, and somehow Germany in particular, is some sort of security guarantee in Europe. The historical test of this assumption was how WWII unfolded. UK and France had promised to ensure Poland's safety and independence. They failed at their promises in 1939 and UK betrayed all semblance of such promises at Yalta.
This century, similar promises to Ukraine (Budapest memorandum) were put to the test and failed in 2014 and are failing right now. This is how much such promises are worth.
The best we, the betrayed countries, can do is to remind the fact that there were promises and can you please try better. Or at least not repeat the same mistake again. The result is that the mistakes are being repeated as we speak.
At any rate, there is no denial that such were the promises and that there was a complete and utter betrayal. Repeatedly. Oh, and what has Germany been doing all this time? In 1939, Germany was Hitler. This century, Germany has been Schröder and Merkel and Scholz. Your only ground for assuming that Germany is any sort of security guarantee in Europe is absolute delusion.
The Baltic States existed at the pleasure of whoever were the tsar of Russia (or not, when that tsar was Stalin). Without European friends they would not exist at all.
Russia kinda cares if Estonia exists or not. Namely, when Estonia exists, Russia wants it to cease to exist. In contrast, our Western "friends" don't care at all. And your entire line of reasoning is a solid proof of it.
Historically, there was a conference at Yalta. At that conference our Western "friends" gifted away to Stalin far more than Hitler had given. Moreover, Hitler really did not mean to gift away anything. He stabbed Stalin in the back and tried to take all Russia to himself. Whereas our Western "friends" casually stabbed in the back ALL countries between Germany and Russia, giving them away to Stalin, narrowly missing Austria. They gifted all those countries away and sincerely meant it so. This is how little they care about any of those countries, Estonia included. Our Western "friends" do not care whether any of those smaller countries exist, but they love to prop up Russia.
It is good to know facts and have no illusions. It's an illusion to think that Estonia has Western friends. Westerners are who they always were: colonists, just like Russia. They play the game they always played: the colonial game with Russia. Despite their rhetoric, Westerners don't care about the colonised. Their complete cold-heartedness is clear from the fact that Westerners pretend as if the colonial times were in the past and no longer happening, when they clearly continue to colonise even now. They pay more attention to Russia who is a potential competing colonist. Colonists care about each other. They don't care about the colonised. So no, Westerners are not friends.
Over the past decade we have seen how Ukraine is being fed to Russia. All other countries between Germany and Russia can reasonably expect the same fate, if they make the mistake of relying on Germany, France, UK, or USA.[1] The best Estonia can do is to stir up some historical conscience to invite Westerners to stop repeating their past mistakes, but thus far this has only resulted in consistent evidence that Westerners have no conscience and are hell-bent on repeating past mistakes.
Would NATO risk that, and a potential nuclear war, for a small, barely populated piece of land. A gambling tsar might just try.
Being a nuclear coward means that there are no principles and no conscience. The West only has colonial instincts and respects the instincts of other colonial countries, dictators, autocrats and despots. Countries and peoples who never harmed anybody do not matter to our Western "friends".
But that distraction, gaining Estonia, would not be worth it if Russia lost Kaliningrad, a naval base they actually need(ed).
Assuming that Russia gives a damn about what anything is worth is a persistent delusion in the West. In reality, Russia only thinks "it's mine/ours" ("Наша!") and that's it. And in the big picture they think everything is theirs, somewhat like USA thinks. Worth it or not does not enter their mind.
We are beyond that now. An invasion of Estonia would be risky on its own terms. They could, and probably would, try some form of hybrid warfare, but probably only with implausible deniability.
Yet another very sad delusion in the West, as if hybrid warfare by Russia could or would happen at some point, instead of having been constantly battled for the past 20 or so years, if not longer. Russia's plausible deniability is there only for the useful idiots. With our Western "friends" so fast asleep and so hopelessly blind, there really is nothing left to say.
1 The historical character and geopolitical nature of these countries is colonial. Their primary instincts and behaviour are colonial. One might dispute this for Germany, as Germany was late to the post-exploration era colonialism. The answer to this is that with the permanent conquest of Estonia, Latvia and Prussia in 13th century Germany actually had a good headstart in the colonial games.↵
Sometimes thought to be a painting, the image, it turns out, was a Victorian-era photograph of a man who made thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwestern England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 at the time, according to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo.
Mr. Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, stumbled upon the picture in March while scouring the internet for new releases at auction houses that might be interesting for his research, which includes the area’s well-known landmark Stonehenge.
As he was looking through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a photo he had seemingly seen before. “There was something familiar about it straight away,” he said in a phone interview. (Mr. Edwards was the proud owner of a “Led Zeppelin IV” LP from the year the album was released, he said, and he listens to it to this day, albeit on a CD.)
[...]
As for how that photo ended up on the album cover: Legend has it that Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s vocalist, and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they spotted a colorized version of the photograph that will be on view in the Wiltshire Museum.
Oh, I forgot: You follow the party line! 